The Lords of Time

by Eva García Sáenz

  I wanted to feel the same way.

  Because if I could only look at death that way again, it would mean I wasn’t accustomed to loss, to living without all those people who had passed on: my parents, my grandmother, Paula and the twins, Martina, Jota, Nieves.

  I took a deep breath and approached her after the others walked away.

  “My condolences. You’re Matu’s girlfriend, aren’t you?”

  “And you’re Kraken,” she managed to reply.

  I thought I saw a hint of bitterness in her puffy eyes, although I could have been projecting my own guilt.

  In any case, her response surprised me. I had always assumed MatuSalem treated our relationship with the utmost discretion. Although I suppose at that age, most people share all kinds of things with their partner that they shouldn’t. Still, I felt bad—awful, in fact.

  I nodded and moved away. She seemed to be the epicenter of everyone’s grief. My heart ached for her.

  Did MatuSalem die because of me, because of what I’d asked him to do? Or was he just another victim of the sadist bent on re-creating The Lords of Time? Had his surname, Maturana, doomed him?

  Estí, Milán, and Peña, sitting in a vehicle in the parking lot, were filming people entering and leaving the cemetery. They stood out like foxes in a chicken coop. Despite the work we had to do, I was pretty shaken, so I stopped analyzing my surroundings and focused on getting through the service as best I could.

  “What’s going on, Kraken?” Lutxo said, walking up to me after MatuSalem’s coffin had slid into its niche. “Anything you want to share?”

  “Now’s not the time, Lutxo,” I whispered.

  He didn’t seem to be listening.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Since the double crime of the dolmen, every murder investigation comes with a gag order. You guys tell us nothing. Well, too bad. The public wants to know what’s going on and whether they should be worried. This kid’s death has set off a lot of alarm bells….”

  “How did you find out?” I asked.

  “That’s irrelevant. But if you must know: Some people from Gamarra saw an ambulance, they stuck around, the forensics team arrived, and the cordons went up. Anybody with a cell phone can take a picture, they share it on WhatsApp, and the information filters through to us. These days, everyone is a potential source.”

  All very vague, very Lutxo. I wouldn’t get anything out of him, but nor did I want anything. I turned around, desperate to get away.

  “As an investigator, there’s nothing I can tell you. The investigation is ongoing. If we issue a press release, you’ll hear about it.”

  You could have poisoned the water supply of several cities with the look Lutxo gave me. I walked off, leaving him in my wake. I’d had enough of cemeteries.

  That was when I saw him.

  He was sitting on a tombstone. I think he’d been waiting for me.

  Tasio Ortiz de Zárate.

  The guy who had spent twenty years in jail for the double crime of the dolmen. The guy who had maintained his innocence but who no one took seriously until I decided to listen to him. The guy who had fled to the States after his release.

  He was hiding behind a pair of expensive shades and a tailored suit. He motioned for me to join him. I don’t know why, but I instinctively felt for the gun holstered inside my jacket. I felt like I was like walking straight toward the angry animals from Matu’s barrel.

  “I thought you were in Los Angeles,” I said, sitting beside him. We were perched on a tomb, the final resting place for someone who had died several decades ago.

  The granite was freezing, but I didn’t want him to have the territorial advantage. We stared at MatuSalem’s colorful procession, refusing to even look at each other.

  “I had to come for Samuel Maturana’s sake,” he said. His gravelly voice took me back to our prison meetings a few lifetimes ago.

  “When did you get in? You must have bought a last-minute flight….Or were you already here?”

  He smiled, and I had the sense that he was expecting questions.

  “Are you interrogating me?”

  “Not yet. I’m just saying that I’m impressed you made it in time for the funeral.”

  “I did it for Maturana,” he repeated, his face stiff with anger this time.

  “Is there anything you can tell me that might help with the investigation? You knew him better than I did.”

  “We kept in touch. He wasn’t getting into trouble anymore. He had reformed; he’d learned to appreciate the life he created for himself outside prison. I think he’d grown up. I tried to be a sort of father to him, to make him feel like he could depend on me, for money, moral support….Clearly it didn’t help. What happened, Kraken?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be so upset,” I admitted.

  “Does this have anything to do with you? Did you get him mixed up in something? Did you go to him for help?”

  I looked away in frustration. When he understood what my silence meant, he exploded.

  “Damn you, Kraken! If his death is your fault…”

  “What? What are you going to do to me? Do you think I wanted to see him dead?” I retorted. “You dare to say this to me when you destroy everything you touch?”

  I glanced around. I’d raised my voice on hallowed ground, and people wouldn’t take kindly to that. Thankfully, no one was near us. There were only headstones and, far off in the distance, a few people were leaving.

  “Well, I see we have unresolved issues. You’re still angry with me about Deba,” he muttered.

  “You keep away from her,” I exclaimed.

  “Or what?”

  “Or nothing, Tasio. I’m not stupid enough to threaten you. All I’m saying is if you really care about her or you think you might grow to love her, then leave her alone. Don’t destroy her life. I’ve had enough of this. I’m sick of spending my time with scum, going to funerals—I’m sick of the public expecting me to produce miracles. I have no idea how many times a person can rebuild their life, but I imagine it’s a finite number.”

  “Look, I realize this isn’t the best time, Unai, but I want to point out that until now, I’ve respected your wishes. After what happened to DSU Salvatierra during the Water Rituals case, I stopped bothering you. I thought you’d both been through enough.”

  “Your absence was duly noted.”

  And much appreciated.

  I had always wondered why Tasio had stopped insisting on a paternity test. It had been two long years, and we hadn’t heard a word. His lawyer had been in touch a couple of times about the TV series he wanted to write based on the double crimes of the dolmen, but I’d asked Germán to deal with it. I wanted nothing to do with Tasio. I wanted him out of our lives. And yet here he was, back in Vitoria.

  “Couldn’t I see her, just for a little while?”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was pleading or probing.

  “What for, Tasio? So you can get close to her? It’s better if she knows nothing about you or Ignacio. As you said, we’ve suffered enough.”

  “You don’t have a restraining order against me. You wouldn’t be able to stop me,” he said sharply.

  “Her mother just passed away,” I snapped.

  “Who?”

  “Alba’s mother. She died a few days ago. Deba and I are the only family she has left other than my family, my brother and grandfather….Don’t destroy that, Tasio. We’re broken enough as it is; we need to prop each other up or we’ll fall apart completely.”

  “At least you have a family. After twenty years in prison, I have nobody in Vitoria besides my brother. My friends, my cuadrilla, my relatives—the dead and the living—they’ve all vanished into thin air. They don’t want to know anything about me. Most of them refuse my calls. A few have agreed to meet me for coffee, but then they can’t wait to get
away. Women are nervous around me; they avoid me. At least in Los Angeles, I’m just an anonymous guy working in the industry, an intriguing European screenwriter. I’ve lost Vitoria, Kraken. It’s gone. I just want to have something pure left.”

  “I’m sorry about the injustice you suffered, Tasio. Remember I was the one who caught the guy who did this to you, at no small cost to myself. But solving the problems of the adults around her isn’t Deba’s job. She doesn’t deserve to be brought up as the daughter of a serial killer. You have to stay away. Why can’t you rebuild your life, start a family of your own? Why do you need Deba? I don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t. How could you? I’ll never be able to get close to a woman again. I’ll never have a child of my own.”

  “Maybe not here, but you said it yourself: in Los Angeles, people know nothing about you.”

  “You still don’t get it. I can’t have sex with a woman. Prison destroyed that for me, too.” He lowered his head. He had murmured these last words, as though afraid that someone might hear.

  “What do you mean? You’ve gotten over your time behind bars, haven’t you? You’re yourself again.”

  “They castrated me.” He removed his dark glasses. His eyes were bloodshot. He kicked the leaves strewn on the ground.

  “What?”

  “My first year in prison, some of the inmates…they castrated me. To them, I was a monster who’d killed eight kids. What they felt for me…it was deeper than hatred. No one tried to stop them; the other inmates and the guards looked the other way. They stopped me from bleeding to death to avoid a scandal, but no one felt sorry for me. It changed me. I became a true monster. For a long time, I frightened myself. But I had this burning desire to survive, to get out of there. That’s why I protected MatuSalem when he arrived. I couldn’t bear to see the other inmates destroy him the way they had destroyed me. He was young; he’d get out in no time. I knew that if they ruined him, though, he might end up doing a lot of harm on the outside. He was impressionable. I did my best to influence him, to keep him safe, both inside and outside prison. But in the end, I couldn’t protect him. Now do you see why Deba is so important to me?”

  I stood up, reeling from what I’d heard.

  “Before you take the next step, think about the lives you’ll destroy if you pursue this. I hope I never see you again, Tasio Ortiz de Zárate. I hope I never see you as long as I live.”

  20

  K, +THN1

  UNAI

  October 2019

  A few hours after MatuSalem’s funeral, I forced myself to find Doctor Guevara. I wanted to see Matu’s autopsy report. I would have to make myself look at the photographs of his corpse, the clinical data on the weight of his organs, the cold facts about the cause of death.

  I owed it to him.

  I owed him for the favors he’d done for me over the years, for agreeing to get involved, for immersing himself whenever I’d asked him to make my cause his. What a poor mentor I had been. As disastrous as Tasio. Between us, we’d failed to protect the boy. If I were being honest with myself, I’d simply used him for his brainpower.

  The guilt was killing me.

  “Inspector.” Doctor Guevara’s voice brought me back to the world of the living. “Just the man I wanted to see. I have something to show you. It was overlooked when he was first found because he was fully clothed.”

  I sat down, facing her, and looked at the autopsy file as if it were toxic. I finally forced myself to open it and study the crime scene photographs.

  “I want you to test everything you found on the riverbank. He must have fought back, left some trace of what happened there,” I said.

  She showed me a photograph of the left arm. It was still hard to believe that the bluish corpse had once been Matu.

  “That’s why I wanted you to see this. The victim scratched it on his arm after he was placed in the barrel with the animals.”

  Horrified, I stared at the image. I could only make out a few barely legible, jagged symbols.

  “What do you think it says?” she asked me.

  “It looks like K+THNI. K plus thni?” I ventured. I wasn’t convinced.

  “I think there’s another mark. Was he was trying to write something else, do you think, and didn’t finish it? Or is it just a random scratch, like the ones on his face, neck, and hands?”

  “No. It’s a comma,” I said. “I think he wrote K, +THNI, or THN1….I can’t tell if the last mark is an I or the number one. In any case, did he write it or did his killer?”

  “No, I’m confident he did it—and you’ll never guess how. Look, these are the photographs of the animals put inside the barrel by the maniac who did this.”

  “It’s poena cullei, one of the punishments in the novel,” I said.

  “A cruel, terrible way to die. The animals panic when they’re stuffed into the barrel. It gets covered and then thrown into the water. The person trapped with them suffers all kinds of injuries. Snake bites, too, if the snake was alive.”

  “It wasn’t, though, was it? Snakes hibernate this time of year.”

  “It was taxidermy. A prop,” she replied. “But I’m afraid the other animals were still very much alive. Look at the victim’s right hand. It’s far more scratched than his left. The boy grabbed the rooster’s spur and wrote these signs with it. See, these tiny wounds were left by the animal’s beak and claws when it defended itself. It couldn’t have been easy. The dog and cat bit and scratched his legs, which were partially protected by his clothes. The animals tried to claw their way out; the cat’s paws were torn and full of splinters.”

  “Will you send over the toxicology report? We should find out if he had any drugs in his system.”

  “Of course. Although if he reacted the way we think he did, he was in full possession of his faculties. That suggests he wasn’t drugged in any way.”

  You don’t know what this kid was capable of, I almost said.

  MatuSalem had sent me a message.

  A warning. To me.

  Of that I was certain. He knew he wasn’t going to make it out alive. And he knew I’d be at his autopsy.

  The K was me: Kraken. But what was he trying to tell me with plus THN I? Or was it Kraken, plus THN1?

  What had MatuSalem found in Ramiro Alvar Nograro’s tower?

  Then it dawned on me. I knew what the warning meant.

  It was what I’d been thinking since I last visited the Nograro family home: Kraken, more than one.

  That was the message. Matu had reached the same conclusion as me: maybe Alvar wasn’t one person, but several.

  21

  LA PLAZA DEL JUICIO

  DIAGO VELA

  Winter, the Year of Our Lord 1192

  A lame donkey brought Ruiz to the Plaza del Juicio from his prison cell near the Sant Viçente fortress. By royal decree, the court of mediation’s trials were held at the town gates, so the townspeople congregated beneath the South Gate next to the old cemetery at Sant Michel Church.

  The artisan families—rope makers, tinkers, cobblers, grocers, and millers—stood on one side. On the other, watching the accused anxiously beneath the tower stairs, gathered the petty noblemen and aristocrats: the Ortiz de Zárates, the Mendozas, the Isunzas, along with a few other noblemen from the outlying villages, including Avendaños and his son.

  Some were on horseback. Onneca sat sidesaddle on Olbia, ignoring the admiring stares of the townspeople.

  Ruiz’s probable fate was a summary execution. The boughs of the old oak at the foot of the Sant Viçente fortress were sturdy enough to bear a hanged man.

  A couple of goats, oblivious to the noise below, had scaled the tree to nibble its frozen shoots.

  “Lorenço, get those goats down! This isn’t grazing day,” the mayor ordered, his belly protruding beneath his long, bushy beard.

>   Embarrassed by the crowd’s jeers, the goatherd, a young lad soon to be ten years old, whistled to the animals. Bleating, they climbed down from the tree.

  The mayor, Pérez de Oñate, disliked being the focus of attention.

  Mendieta, the executioner, a giant of a man with red hair and a flowing beard, tugged on the reins of the bony donkey, turning the animal to present the prisoner riding it to the town authorities. Ruiz’s hands were tied behind his back. As he drew closer, I noticed something about his face that alarmed me.

  I walked up to him. Although my wound had stopped bleeding and the physician had applied a fresh bandage to my back, I was not completely recovered. Still, I needed to attend the trial.

  I could see that Ruy’s son was no better off than me. There was blood caked around his mouth. Fearing the worst, I parted his lips.

  “Good God!” I cried. “They’ve cut out his tongue! Who was on guard duty at the prison?” I asked the lieutenant.

  Lieutenant Petro Remírez, a fellow with a droopy mustache, stormed over.

  “When did this occur, and why wasn’t I told?”

  The two guards escorting the prisoner cowered.

  Petro went up to one of them. “Bermudo?” he asked the leaner of the two, seizing the man’s chin and forcing him to make eye contact.

  “It happened the night he was brought to the prison. It was Saint Agatha’s Eve, and we were out carousing with everyone else. We left him locked in the cell while we went out, and we found him like this the next morning.”

  “How did it happen if he was locked in?” asked the mayor.

  “It’s not as strange as you might think,” replied the other guard. “Somebody beckoned Ruiz over, and when he got close enough, they grabbed him through the bars and did the deed. How were we to know? Nothing like that ever happens here.”

  “Well, it has now!” the lieutenant shouted. “While you were gobbling eggs and smoked sausage and sloshing wine all over Villa de Suso, someone cut out this poor wretch’s tongue.”